In well-run organisations, plans made by senior management are based on information passed to them by subordinates. All levels of the management of an enterprise might have access to a data repository containing information about the history of the business, sometimes known as a data warehouse.
Business planning applications, among them budgeting and forecasting, are increasingly being integrated into an advanced data warehouse solution in order to maximize the payback of the considerable investment in both the computing facilities and the gathering of the data they contain. Data warehousing enables a company to eliminate an extensive amount of workload generated by various reporting tasks. It also facilitates the standardization of data throughout the organization. The company-wide use of such applications results in improved internal communications and more efficient team work.
In dimensional modeling, a data warehouse contains different dimensions and a fact set related to the business structure. Each dimension represents a collection of unique entities that contribute to, and participate in, the fact set independent of entities from another dimension. The fact set also usually contains transactional data where each transaction is identified by a combination of entities, one from each dimension. Within a data warehouse, each dimension is a table where each record contains a key (or a composite key) to uniquely identify each entity and a list of attributes to qualify or describe the corresponding entity (or key). Each fact record in the fact table contains a foreign key to join to each dimension as well as a list of those measures representing the transactional data.
In its usual form such a data warehouse provides the following potential business benefits, among others:                Assist in identification and understanding of business trends and risks        Assist in identification and understanding of customer behaviour        Assist in improvement in the quality of forecasts        Enabling customer segmentation        Improvement in customer profitability        Improving product and service quality        Enabling smarter marketing and targeting        Optimizing the use of resources        
Typically, data warehousing overcomes the conflicts between information requirements and the current operational databases by copying data from the operational or transactional system, often transforming them into a more usable format, and storing them in a separate database optimized for supporting analytical users—so-called Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Multi-dimensional OLAP (MOLAP).
Multidimensional navigation and data analysis allow users the freedom to make effective use of the large quantity of data stored in a data warehouse. For example, sales performance may be viewed by company, division, department, salesperson, area, product and customer. Thus, the user can “turn the database cube” to view the information from a variety of desired angles or perspectives, first by department and then by area, for example. A ‘drill-down’ function allows the user to select a specific area (geographic) of interest and break it down further by product. Further drill-down on a specific product lets the user explore sales by period.
The above is more fully and clearly described in “An Introduction to Database Systems” by C J Date, 7th Edition, 2000, Chapter 21 Decision Support, pp 694-729.
The basic idea of OLAP is that users should be able to manipulate enterprise data models across many dimensions to understand changes that are occurring.
Business planning applications, among them budgeting and forecasting, are increasingly being integrated into an advanced data warehouse solution in order to maximize the payback of the considerable investment in both the computing facilities and the gathering of the data they contain. Data warehousing enables a company to eliminate an extensive amount of workload generated by various reporting tasks. It also facilitates the standardization of data throughout the organization. The company-wide use of such applications results in improved internal communications and more efficient team work.
The deployment of wide area networks, in particular the internet and its enterprise-wide equivalents, has resulted in the potential for revolutionary changes in the way enterprises manage their business internally. For example, a primary advantage of a web-based budgeting application is that it permits and encourages high participation throughout an organization. Users can access the application from around the world, at the appropriate level of detail and security, allowing organizations to adapt quickly and to make rapid changes to their goals and strategies. All relevant employees can participate directly in the budgeting process so that plans are developed using information from those who are actually involved in that area of the business. Users simply enter the data relevant to their function, and a calculation engine automatically generates the corresponding financial data after confirming its compatibility with other related data, and integrating it with that other data. This means that upper management can gain a better understanding of the business unit managers' forecasts and the assumptions underlying them.
Upper management is responsible for the strategic goals of the organization and must often explore so-called “what-if” scenarios. The business unit managers, on the other hand, are responsible for reaching these goals through revenue improvement, cost control, and resource allocation. Through web-based budgeting applications, upper management can set goals and priorities in the system to encourage the accomplishment of required objectives. As well, upper management can input standard rates or key planning assumptions such as salary grade levels, product prices, production capacity, inflation rates, and foreign exchange rates to ensure consistency throughout the plan. Business unit managers together with their upper management can, through a series of iterative steps, develop a plan that is aligned with the strategic goals of the organization. Thus a web-based budgeting application bridges the gap between upper management and the business unit management.
Although a number of products address some of the needs for putting together plans for large enterprises, they each have their shortcomings. Examples are “CONTROL”1 by KCI Computing, Inc. of Torrance, Calif., and “e.Planning”2 by ADAYTUM of Bloomington, Minn. None of these products have the ability to allow multiple alternate plans to be presented to a superior before selection and rollup into that superior's plan. They are all restricted in their ability to allow roles to have significant complexity in more than one dimension. 1™ of KCI Computing, Inc.2™ of ADAYTUM